deontology

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

n. Ethical theory concerned with duties and rights.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. The ethical study of duties, obligations, and rights, with an approach focusing on the rightness or wrongness of actions themselves and not on the goodness or badness of the consequences of those actions.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. The science which relates to duty or moral obligation.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. The science of duty; ethics.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

Examples

Yet in some of his writings, Greene suggests that this weighs against deontological ethics, indicating that deontology is just a kind of rationalization of unreconstructed emotional prejudices, seeking (as Nietzsche said of Kant) “to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right.”